Would NOT be suprised to discover in the near future this is explicitly some broad-spectrum scrambling in a military application we're not supposed to know about yet. These machines are rapidly improving and will not be deployed to the streets to serve the state's interest of exercising a monopoly on violence until they are essentially perfect, and one of the big reasons the militarization of police forces is being hindered nowadays is how ubiqtuous cellphone recording devices are and how broadly they are uncovering police corruption. These machines will be deployed around the same time Google deploys its driverless car as a way to turn up the heat slowly on a population whose civil rights are being boiled away like a lobster. The excuse that will be made is that it's not temperamental like an officer, and it's drug sniffer is not prone to error like a K9 unit, with the communication and recording device jamming as the final cherry on top.

For bans I'm talking about purposely misrepresenting your language where there's the six option thing under "preference" like Russians do to play in US West/East English games. If you really don't know any of those six languages, you just won't check the boxes anyway. If you're like, some regional dialect of Bantu language or whatever, I imagine you play with other speakers if you want to enjoy the game at all
Epic this ftw
Cosmetics definitely need to be harder to get to start out, I like how they say you can't find "arcana" items until a certain level, if they made it high enough for other cosmetics it would help with instant account dumping. If you make it, like, level 20 to find purples or [arbitrary tier amount here] it makes sense to want to hang onto the same account with good behavior, and also incentivizes more item purchases, if you are able to buy whatever you want from level 1
There would be so much variance it almost wouldn't be worth reading. It'd be like, magic the gathering levels of errata with 25 exceptions for every point and every time you end up against Bane/Mirana lanes like explained on the podcast, etc.
If there's noob advice worth a damn, it's just Don't Try To Be A Hero. All the really egregious fuckups flow from that, and if you manage that, the other things you do wrong people won't get mad at, or at least won't have any ground to mouth off about

1. any queueing system that is pairing 4 stack teams against 5 rando's each single-queueing is not super well thought out. just having pressure from knowing people you don't wanna fuck up around is worth like 1000 MMR
2. i'm honestly surprised games have come this far and not experimented more with a bottom-up community justice system. the GM approach is just never as good as it needs to be. wow was full of toxic nonsense as well, because the police were spread so thin only murder got investigated, so to speak (outright stealing, racism, etc.) Players will always be better at detecting something fishy or terrible going on than the most cleverly programmed wardens or bots. at the very least, what about a scarlet letter system to go with the commend system? instead of friendly, you get braggadocios or w/e
3. if you're doing free-to-play, you pretty much need hair trigger and brutal bans. there should be bans even for like, playing on another language regions servers when you don't know the language. there are so many quality of life bans dota is not getting. i'd ban for more than 2 disconnects in a game, or at least have some kind of lagger ghetto. i turn torrents off and have never had problems other than some 3-second ghosting, and i'm on cox cable's cheapest tier garbage internet. it's like... if someone had a cat that kept attacking the settlers of catan board. you can be shocked 1 or 2 times that the cat is so bad tempered, but after that, it's the person's fault for not spiriting the cat away for nappy time

Did Chris get caught up on the Simpsons? I can't imagine a worse fate than to be born late Xer/early Millennial and have no grasp of the Simpsons at all. You can skip like, Monty Python & the Holy Grail or Ghostbusters or Jurassic Park and it's not gonna ruin your chances of communicating with your peers, once you learn the two or three things that get repeated... but Simpsons? That's like, bare minimum, one hundred different references or lines you need to know by heart to take part in a certain class of cultural conversation conventions

By which definition? I have seen that policy used for a number of different things by forum moderators on other parts of the internet, and it sometimes implies "don't say anything significantly challenging the consensus of the hivemind"
Nothing I have seen posted in the thread so far is hateful or offensive, but I don't want to bother defending my point with a lot of words if it just means instant deletion + ban from posting again

Weird Czech guys - I love love love crazy European sentiments that lead to weird engines, styles, etc. I love that STALKER has like, DirectX11 SSAO tech and super shadows and who knows what else, but monsters that are still designed with the Quake 2 aesthetic. I love the insanity in Paradox games. American UIs, designs, etc. these days too often feel like Diablo 3, all the edges rounded and polished off to perfect marketable ISO standards
Graphics jumps forward - I hate how this is slowing down too. It feels too bound up with console generations now, in the early 3dfx/Geforce days, it felt like at least some game was always implementing whatever small leap forward, like UT2004 supported the ridiculous rounding out/scaling polygon thing that came with my Radeon, nowadays, if your computer does significantly more than an Xbox/Playstation, you're at most gonna get one more level of AA/AF and high resolution, because everything is so tied to simultaneous release/making as much portable between platforms as possible
Drugs - Don't ever fight to stay up on Ambien, it's like Memento, you are fully awake and conscious and yet continually forgetting what just happened in a total blackout, got-raped-in-the-frat-house way
Also, as a degenerate cannabis junkie, there are heroes in DOTA2 I can play sober (more twitchy ones) and there are more slow moving turret-like ones, like Jakiro, that I only learned how to play while intoxicated and cannot play well sober =\
Sunbeams effect - It's just a glow effect, like a halo in a Renaissance painting -

Counter-point: It does work a lot of times. Hunting and exploring for strange bits of lore was fun for a lot of things in WOW (the AQ gate opening race for sure.) Also, reading all the random logs and bits of story in Deus Ex or System Shock 2. When you can get people to imagine how a set-piece came to be, or how the world we are living in transformed into one like Deus Ex, but can't actually develop the content, just having expository lore laying around works really well.
I understand and mostly hate how the lore works in Skyrim/Oblivion, but for all the terrible/bad lore, there are still some good points. Finding the Daedric lord quests in Elder Scrolls games is usually a hoot, because they do have such determined personalities, and you wanna see how they manifest their evil differently in each game, how is Clavicus Vile gonna try to screw you over this time, etc.
It's reductionist to say it doesn't work. It just rarely works, and works well in a narrow range of situations, and where things are well designed to be novel and make you think "how did this get here?" It's no coincidence the Daedric lord quests are the most unique/least Fedex dungeon quests in TES.

Totally identify with the icky feeling for shooting Indians. My friends got totally into a shooter that happened during the Vietnam War once and I just couldn't do it. I was like, this wasn't a good or fun war

is it just me or are the marines way stupider in black mesa source. i ask because its been a long time and it might just be nostalgia but fighting those marines in hl1 in 1998 was like, watching the terminator, they were like, AI codified into a killing machine. in my playthrough of black mesa source i was juking them and cheesing them mad easy though, like, exposing only half of my body climbing on a ladder up out of a hole, just enough to get my reticle on them, and then firing, they couldn't do anything. also like, just slowly coming around a corner so i only see their arm or hand and blasting them with the .357 magnum because its instant kill that close. it seems to me like there was no way the hl1 marines would stand for anything like that, they seemed like FPS borg, maybe i could have done that cheesy tactic once or twice but then they'd instantly adapt
i can say for sure the sound affects it, because they sound like monsters in hl1, like, different than what you are as a human and upsetting:
and in black mesa source they sound like any other generic military goons in video gaming:
also i have OCD problems with it like mentioned on the podcast, like the first time you see the marines in hl1 is when you get to the surface, right? for like 2 minutes max but at least you get to fresh air before having to go under again for the tentacle encounter... in black mesa source you don't get to the surface until like the sattellite launch? it totally threw off my sense of pacing. its real close but doesn't match the original

the funny thing about bringing up the nine inch nails broken video as an underground, guerilla sort of thing was that was actually a corporate marketing move in and of itself... MTV had problems with the 'down in it' video, being investigated as being too close to a snuff film, and was very antsy about playing NIN videos after... so they made the broken movie as torture porn to create alternative rock cred about being "too hot for the man to handle" and so when the hype built up and the closer video by mark romanek came out a couple years later and it was crazy and creepy, it got heavy rotation on MTV and made NIN like rock superstars after that